Sunday, 7 January 2018

Book Review | The Himalayan Summer

Ellie Jeffreys arrives in Darjeeling with her British husband, en route to Kathmandu. They have ten-month-old, golden-haired twins, and despite appearing to be a happy family, Ellie's relationship with the overbearing, philandering Francis is disintegrating.

At a cocktail party, Ellie meets Hugh Douglas, a maverick explorer and botanist. Despite the rumours surrounding Hugh, Ellie is drawn to him. A year later, Nepal is devastated by a catastrophic earthquake and in a falling building, Ellie is forced to make an instant, and terrible, decision: she has time to save only one of her children. When she returns for her son's body the next day, it has gone. Ellie knows he cannot have disappeared; someone, somewhere has her child, and it is to Hugh that she turns for help.

Review

The Himalayan Summer is a heart wrenching tale of a mother making the most awful decision of choosing which of her children to save from a natural disaster. Ellie sinks her teeth into evil men, dresses in dirty men's rags and pursues every possible avenue to find her son. Being in India with a drunken husband is one thing, but when your story includes prostitutes, earthquakes and missing children the plot takes on a whole different approach.There's some realistic scenes, some of which may be unsettling for some readers, which really set the tone and mood of the book with characters which bounce off of the page. There are small elements which let the book down slightly but they don't hinder the reading of the story. The Himalayan Summer is an adventurous story with horrendous decisions and equally nasty characters, which ( if you like that thing ) you can also get a touch of in The Life She Left Behind by Jessica Blair.